We have a thousand nights (at our disposal)
by writerwithoutcause
Summary: There are many ways to fall asleep - slowly, quickly, without even noticing - but none are as pleasant as falling asleep next to your precious person. A SakuIno collection of drabbles. AU. Femslash. Mentions of sexual situations. Sakura-centric. The collection is marked complete, but drabbles might be added to it if inspiration strikes me.
1. 28 years

December 5th, 2014; 28 years old

Being a doctor is hard work. Endless years of studying and interning and practicing and a job that keeps you up at night, wondering why the world is just so _wrong_. Being an ER doctor is a little like that, only ten times more stressful and bloody.

Still, Sakura chose this, and she wouldn't have it any other way, really, but, standing in the doorway of her apartment and ransacking the pockets of her coat for the keys while trying to hold both her purse and the half-full bag of groceries in one hand, she does wish her working schedule would at least _try_ to resemble a normal human being's. It's two a.m. on a Friday night - technically Saturday morning - for crying out loud, and she's only just managed to escape Tsunade-sama's despotic supervision.

And that's kind of a record, if she's honest, because it's usually _waaay_ past four in the morning by the time she gets home. She'd had luck today, it had been an easy evening, no car accidents or house fires, and Nodame, Tsunade-sama's other (former) apprentice, had for once in her life arrived on time to start her shift - Sakura feels tired but mostly awake, thanks to her traditional one a.m. cup of awful, terrible coffee from the hospital's coffee machine.

She finds the keys in her left pocket, under a couple of crumpled napkins, a pair of atrociously glittery pink earrings and a flyer about a new Italian restaurant opening soon down the street, and her train of thought cuts off. She unlocks the door and steps inside, flicks on the light switch and drops her purse and grocery bag at her feet and then, with a sigh, closes the door behind her with a dull "thud" that makes her wince and locks it. Sakura drops the grocery bag at her feet and toes off her beat up sneakers, kicks them next to the new pair of dark brown boots by the door (_Ino's, Ino must be home, of course she is, Ino has a normal working schedule and arrives home before most of Tokyo goes to sleep, unlike Sakura_).

Sakura puts her purse on the small re-purposed (incredibly cluttered) coffee table stuffed in the corner next to the door, opposite to the shoes, and finally allows the sigh caught in her throat all day to escape. It's been a long day, albeit not as long as it could have been, and now that Sakura's finally home, the smell of shoes and _home_ the perfumed wooden sticks Ino bought a couple of months ago in her nose makes her breathe a little easier, though she does scrunch her nose at the old shoes. Yeah, she could do without the smell of stinky feet, but at least Ino's perfume sticks mostly cover it up.

Sakura runs her hand through her pink, pink hair before taking off her coat and muffler and hanging them. She takes a deep breath and allows herself one moment to rearrange her thoughts, trying to leave the medic in her at work, where it belongs (at least until Ino cuts her finger, then Sakura's all business).

It takes a moment to do that and the two oranges that had fallen out of the grocery bag when she dropped it are promptly picked up afterwards, and put back before Sakura picks up the bag and carries it to the kitchen. The oranges end up in the pathetically empty fruit bowl, next to the three wrinkled apples Sakura hasn't got around to eating but can't quite throw away yet (they're food, okay? Dried up, wrinkly, old food, maybe, but food nonetheless, and you don't throw away food).

Sakura opens the fridge, stacks the butter on top of another package of butter (ah, of course, she'd forgotten Ino had texted her to say she'd buy it, but at least they won't run out of it any time soon like this). She leaves the liquid hand soap on the kitchen table, in the middle of it, because the last time she put it on the kitchen counters, Ino had assumed it was dishwashing detergent and the label had peeled off after Sakura had dropped it in the sink (neither the bottle or the liquid in it looked like dishwashing detergent but Sakura didn't have the heart to tell Ino the truth) and the bottle ended up staying there - and they'd used liquid soap as dishwashing detergent out of laziness, and Sakura been sooo glad when it emptied, too, because then the food stopped smelling of artificial flowery perfume.

Her stomach growls as her unfocused eyes stare out the kitchen window. Tokyo looks like a mash-up of dark shadows and bright lights through it, and she has the sudden urge to open the window and let some air in, only to remember it's December and the apartment is on the fifth floor and the weather's cold as fuck outside even though there's no chance of snow. And since it's Tokyo, the air would probably be 9/10 carbon dioxide and exhaust fumes and god knows what else, anyway. So she doesn't. Open the window. Besides, the apartment's kind of chilly as it is, what with Ino trying to cut on their living expenses and the temperature staying a modest 20 degrees Celsius at all times.

Sakura's stomach growls once again and she slowly tears her eyes away from the view outside the window and starts to look around the kitchen for a quick snack. She browses through the cupboards but doesn't find anything appetising. She opens the fridge and looks around impatiently, peeking inside lidded pots and eventually taking out what looks like the remains of a take-out meal, a pair of chopsticks still inside the package.

There's some rice noodles with sweet-sour sauce and shrimp, and she digs in with gusto. Her hunger seems to hit her right after the first mouthful and she starts shoveling food inside her mouth and chewing as fast as she can, no table manners at all. By the time she finishes the noodles and only has a couple of shrimps to fish from the bottom of the container, her hunger's mostly appeased, though her stomach still feels a little empty, unfulfilled.

She eyes the newly-bought oranges with interest, but they'll probably keep her awake and make her feel bloated and give her ulcer, what with their vitamin C and citric acid and fructose. She discards the option and gets up, throws the take-out container in the trash and gets herself a glass of water, ends up drinking two.

There are dirty dishes in the sink, Sakura notices, and she knows they'll be even harder to wash in the morning, the food on them crusted and hard, if they aren't already, so she turns up the tap, lets warm-ish water flood over them until they're submerged and then she shuts the water off, leaves them to soak for awhile. _Ahh, what else?_

She looks around the kitchen for a moment, lost in her thoughts. She's not tired, not yet, in any case, and she knows the caffeine in her system will take some time to get out - she finds herself in the unusual position of having a little free time and not knowing what to do. She could watch a movie, she supposes, only she doesn't want to end up waking Ino and she doesn't find the idea of watching TV with the sound off appealing. She could read a book - she still hasn't got around to reading Ichigushi's last novel, "The Darkened Brook", and she's only heard good things about it - but she keeps all her books in the bedroom, where Ino is probably sleeping with one eye open, waiting for her to come to bed.

Ino's been kind of insistent about Sakura waking her up when she arrives home lately, no matter the hour of the night or day. Sakura thinks it might be because they haven't really been able to spend any time together the last couple of weeks, their free time not coinciding much, and Ino... well, Ino worries. Sakura assumes it's partially because of Ino's job, because of course Sakura fell in love with a psychiatrist, of course she did. But that doesn't mean she has to listen to that psychiatrist's dumb request to mess up her sleeping pattern even more, so she decides not to read a book to pass the time, after all. She'll have to find something else to do.

Well, she thinks, looking down on her tight skinny jeans and thick, soft burgundy sweater, the least she can do is get comfortable, so she silently walks to the bathroom, gently closes the door behind her and takes a shower as silently as she can. When she's done with that, she gets her spare pajamas from the cabinet under the sink (a white, long sleeved blouse and pants with a silly baby-duck pattern on them) and changes into them with a happy sigh before realising she might as well take off her make-up and brush her teeth.

It's as she spits the minty toothpaste foam in the sink that she notices the dark brown roots at the base of her hair in the mirror. She runs a hand through her pink dyed hair, wonders when it grew out and thinks she might as well re-dye it today since she's got some free time. She'll have to be careful not to make too much noise, though, otherwise she'll wake Ino up and... Ino deserves her sleep just as much as Sakura deserves to come home and not be interrogated about her day and her mental state at two and a half in the morning, Sakura thinks and tries not to feel too guilty about it.

(Ino keeps nagging Sakura about her passive-aggressive ways, like she's never met Sasuke of the "hn"s and the "mm"s and the razor sharp sarcasm - Sakura sometimes wonders how Naruto puts up with him, but she can never quite remember to the blond that when they meet. She supposes it's for the better - the answer is probably either jarringly sweet or mind-numbingly dirty, and she doesn't need that in her life, _okay_?)

_Ah, yes, yes, dark roots, pink hair_, Sakura reminds herself as she finds her thoughts drifting to her childhood friends.

She searches through the cupboard under the sink for the 15% peroxide solution and latex gloves, because she has to bleach her hair first if she wants to get rid of her out-of-place looking roots - you can't dye dark brown hair pink straight away, you'd just end up with dark brown hair with strange, pink reflexions, and Sakura hasn't made that mistake since she was twelve and first tried to dye her hair. Well _that_ had been a complete failure, she thinks as she puts on just one glove, covers her shoulders with a ratty towel so as not to destroy her pajama blouse and then finally applies the bleaching solution to her dark roots first, and then her whole hair.

She's so, so grateful she'd decided to keep her hair short - it doesn't take a whole bottle to bleach her hair once, for one, and it doesn't take her three hours to dry her hair after washing it, either. And, well, Ino thinks it's cute and likes to run her hands through Sakura's hair, which Sakura rather enjoys but Ino hates, probably, Sakura assumes, because she keeps her long blonde in tight ponytails for most of the day and her scalp hurts at the end of the day. Sakura's tried to convince Ino to let her hair down before bedtime every once in a while or even cut her hair short (god knows it's so long it probably weighs a ton), but she was met with narrowed eyes, stubbornness and definite refusals.

Pink eyebrows turn down in a frown as Sakura finishes applying the bleaching solution to her hair, checks her wristwatch. Two fifty. She'd have to let the peroxide do its job for a quarter of an hour before she can start actually dyeing her hair. She leans closer to the mirror, inspects her eyebrows, but they're just light pink, no brown in sight. She lets out a relieved sigh. She doesn't usually dye her eyebrows more often than once every half a year or so because they just grow so slowly she doesn't have to, but they're still pretty troublesome.

Sakura humms under her breath, her face scant inches away from the mirror, and widens her eyes, looks at the big green eyes in the mirror as they, too, widen. Her dark lashes flutter slightly as she widens her eyes so much they start to hurt, and her goofy expression makes her snort. She leans back from the mirror and goes to sit on the edge of the bathtub. Bleaching her hair takes time, and Sakura would prefer her feet not to hurt by the end of it.

They have a really small bathroom, Sakura realises as she aimlessly lets her eyes wander over the cluttered bathroom counter, over the hanging hook with the five bathrobes. It's not that she doesn't already know it's small, it's just that she's usually too busy or tired or distracted to take in the almost claustrophobic size of it.

_And there's mold starting to grow in one corner, just above the bathtub_. Sakura supposes that's because the bathroom's usually as humid as the equatorial forest, but it's not like it can be helped - there's no window in sight, and the fan never seems to work properly. But they'll have to take care of the mold before it spreads too much or gives them asthma, though. That'd really suck.

Sakura wonders if there are any special cleaning products for getting rid of mold. There's stuff that can get blueberry stains out of coloured clothes without damaging them, so there must be something for mold, too, right? Sakura sighs as she makes a mental note to ask the shopkeeper the next time she goes to the local, hole-in-the-wall, street shop. She looks at her wristwatch. Three and five minutes or so.

She wishes time would pass faster. The caffeine in her blood is starting to disappear under the effects of time and the three a.m.'s bout of sleepiness, and she just wishes to be done with dyeing her hair already. She can't wait to get into bed, curve herself around Ino's body like a parenthesis, kiss the back of her neck and go to sleep surrounded by soft sheets and warmth. Sakura's eyes start to sting, from the flickering light bulb or the tiredness in her bones, she doesn't know, but she raises her left hand halfway to try and rub them to normality when she realises she's still wearing her peroxide-covered glove and getting _that_ in her eyes would be a really, really bad thing.

She lowers the hand and uses her right one to do it. It helps some, but not too much, and it's three twenty by the time she thinks to look at the clock again. Her scalp's itching a little, and it takes a few moments to realise she's left the bleaching solution too long. Fuck.

Sakura walks in front of the mirror and looks at her hair and, well, she's not sure what's happened, but she hopes it's still salvageable and she won't have to cut it short again because it's ruined, like she had to do in high school, once. She washes her hair in the sink with lukewarm water and tries not to any in her eyes. She doesn't.

When she's pretty sure all the solution's out of her hair, Sakura takes off her glove and lets the water drain out of her hair before squeezing what's left of it out with her fist so she doesn't get her pajamas wet. She takes off the ratty towel on her shoulders (she didn't get any bleaching solution on it, good) and dries her hair with it, until it's only damp and no longer dripping water.

Raising her head up to inspect herself in the mirror, Sakura throws the ratty towel in the laundry basket without looking. Her hair's mostly okay despite leaving the bleaching solution in for too long, she's relieved to notice. It's also white and fluffy, and would look kind of cute if the colour weren't so creepy. She threads her fingers through it, observing the yellow-ish roots with satisfaction. The pink will certainly catch after this, she thinks and allows herself five seconds to admire her work before starting to once again look through the cabinet under the sink for the pink dye. Sakura's really tempted to just leave it as it is for the night, white, and dye it tomorrow, but she's done that enough times to know it'll be more like sometimes during the next week than tomorrow, and her sleep's going to suffer anyway.

And fuck if it's an immature thing to think, but she looks like a ghost with white hair, a stranger rather than herself, and it's late enough (early enough) for that to mobilise her into pouring the necessary ingredients in an old and chipped teacup. She puts on another glove and mixes the dye with an old toothbrush until it's a pinkish white and homogenous paste, and then she gets her ratty towel from the laundry basket, only it's still wet so, with a swear, she has to get another (dry) towel and put it underneath the wet, ratty one.

Sakura frowns at her reflection and starts spreading the dye on her hair, from the roots to the ends. It's almost three-forty by the time she's finished, and she spends the next fifteen minutes going over her to-do list for the weekend and waiting for the dye to work.

She'd have to do the dishes, maybe try to clean the bedroom a little. And find a way to get rid of the mold growing on the bathroom ceiling, too, probably buy some special cleaning products. Now that she thinks about it, it might be a good idea to vacuum clean before the dust bunnies had a general meeting and decided to smother them in their sleep and take over the apartment. And she promised Naruto she'd go out with him Saturday afternoon and watch that "Oceanic Rift" movie or whatever it was called, the one with the huge robots and gigantic sea monsters, because apparently Sasuke wanted nothing to do with his boyfriend's terrible taste in movies and Sakura still hadn't acquired immunity to Naruto's kicked-puppy eyes.

And Neji and Tenten were moving into their new apartment that weekend, too, and she'd said she'd help them with the furniture and stuff, which now seems like a stupid thing to do considering she has other, better, things to do, like watch TV and sleep and re-learn Ino's body all over again because after more than three weeks of quickies and stolen kisses, she's probably forgotten how to French kiss.

_Mmm, French kissing_, Sakura thinks with a groan. she wants nothing more than to spend her whole weekend making out with Ino in their bed while the TV plays in the background, like they're teenagers all over again, but that doesn't seem to be possible. The urge to ditch her plans with Naruto and just spend Saturday in bed with Ino is strong, but Sakura knows better than that. Naruto's pretty annoying on his better days, and Ino'd probably grumble something about Sakura isolating herself from her friends and then kick her out of her own home with strict instructions to come back after she's socialised. Damn psychiatrist.

Damn... Sakura's eyes glance at her wristwatch. Three forty eight. Time to wash off the dye before the pink gets too intense and her hair turns fuchsia rather than bubblegum pink. She opens the tap and bows, lets the warm water take the dye with it down the drain in a light pink rush as she runs her fingers through her hair. It takes a few more minutes of this until Sakura's certain the dye's all gone, and then she's drying her hair with the ratty, wet towel first and then the dry, newer towel (good thing it's red or she'd get a sound thrashing from Ino for staining _another_ of their towels with pink dye, which Sakura personally thought wasn't her fault - it just _happened_, alright?).

By the time she finishes, she's so sleepy and tired she has trouble keeping her eyes from closing and her reflection's hair is pink and fluffy and still a little wet but Sakura doesn't want to blow-dry her hair and wake up Ino, and she has no idea where the damned thing is, anyway, so she just wraps the newer towel around her head and calls it a night. Let her hair dry naturally, for all she cares.

She steps out of the bathroom, closes the door and flicks the light off before making her way, in the dark, to the bedroom. She only bumps into the furniture four times, too, which she thinks should be some kind of record, seeing as her and Ino's apartment is a cluttered maze of sharp edges and breakable knick-knacks.

Sakura feels for the doorknob to the bedroom in the dark, opens the door carefully and steps inside holding her breath. She can hear Ino's breaths, a little wheezy in her sleep, and she lets out a breath of her own before closing the door and making her way to the bed, without bumping into anything this time. This is her territory after all, she knows it like the back of her-

Sakura's toes hit the bed with a dull sound and she bends in half, her hand over her mouth to stop any noises from escaping. Mother_fucker_. She whimpers at the pain and rubs her stubbed toes with the hand not preventing her from cursing everyone and their mother. _Fucking_ bed and _fucking_ darkness and _fucking_ stupid working schedule...

It takes a minute for the pain to fade, and after she carefully pulls the blanket so she can slide under it with a tired sigh before crawling close to Ino's sleeping form and throwing an arm over her waist, nuzzling her neck from behind. Ino stirs at that, a little, murmurs "Done with work?" under her breath.

"Yeah," Sakura says back, just as quietly.

"Are you working tomorrow, too, or...?" Ino asks sleepily.

"I've got the rest of the week free," Sakura mumbles as she tightens her one-arm hold over Ino's waist reassuringly. "Finally," she ads with a sigh.

Ino humms as she puts her hand over the one Sakura has slung over her and briefly links their fingers together (a small shiver of... _something_, goes through Sakura, and she has trouble telling if it's desire or just fondness) before Ino's ordering her to "_Go to sleep already, we'll talk tomorrow_."

Sakura snorts quietly but obeys, her eyelids too heavy to keep her tired eyes open. She lets out a deep breath and feels herself falling asleep, falling, falling, falling...

asleep.

Finally.

* * *

><p>I stopped watching the Naruto manga around the Chuunin Exams arc, and this is a real-world AU, so if the characters might seem a bit weird and unrealistic here and there, I'm sorry, but I did the best I could.<p>

I hope you've enjoyed reading this as much as I did writing it!


	2. 15 years

Summer, 2001; 15 years

Sakura wakes up in the middle of the night, hot and sweaty under the thin bed sheet. She sits up and just looks sleepily around the room for a second or two, the boy's t-shirt and shorts she uses as pajamas soaked through with sweat along her back and underarms. It's dark but the sliver of a moon she can see through the window and the weak city lights are enough for her to see the room's much bigger than her own, and differently organised, too. The air is hot and humid and it feels smothering against her clammy skin. Her bladder feels so painfully full that it takes her a few seconds to realise the window must be open, the sounds of the almost nonexistent traffic and the whoosh of rushing wind so close she could just close her eyes and easily imagine herself standing under a streetlight on the edge of an intersection. It's still too hot and humid, though.

There's a rustling sound near her and she turns towards it. She can see long, long pale hair spread over more than half of the bed, and a figure sleeping on her side, her back turned to her and her face towards the window, so close to the edge of the queen bed that Sakura is, for one moment, worried she might fall off. Ino. Right, Ino's house, Ino's body, sleepover. Right. Full bladder.

Ino's body curls in on itself a little and the bed sheets rustle, again. Sakura imagines dragging her away from the edge and curling herself around her, falling asleep with Ino's strawberry shampoo in her nostrils and her warmth on her skin. She sluggishly shakes her head to clear it, because, no, just no. The room's smotheringly hot as it is and Ino's high body temperature (almost as high as Naruto's) would make cuddling a little like drinking hot soup while being slowly roasted alive. Yeah, thanks, no.

Ino stirs, turns to face Sakura in her sleep and nuzzles her pillow. Her cheek still carries the pattern of the wrinkled pillow case on it and she's wheezing with every breath she takes, and when her mouth opens and she starts drooling. Sakura has to bite her lip so she doesn't snicker. Ino, who seems so polished and self-assured and elegant when she's awake, is just as goofy-looking and undignified as everyone else. *Just as human as everyone else.* And she drools in her sleep.

A fond, drowsy smile starts to crawl onto Sakura's face, because she doesn't think anyone's ever seen Ino like this, except for her family, maybe, no one at school and none of her friends have ever seen her sleeping in her underwear without any makeup on, drooling on her pillow (the way Sakura has, does, is currently doing) and that's-it's- it makes Sakura feel a little special (because Ino trusts her, after all the time and the things that happened between them, trusts her not to take embarrassing pictures of her sleeping, or maybe doesn't care if she did). Sakura sluggishly rolls her eyes at her own sappiness, and then yawns.

In any case, seeing Ino sleep also makes Sakura more than a little amused because- Ino drools and wheezes in her sleep, okay? Somehow, the fact always takes Sakura by surprise, no matter how many times she sleeps over at Ino's place, shares the bed with her for the night.

Sakura sighs a little, blearily wondering how it's so hot inside the room even with the window opened. The sensation of fullness in her bladder returns with a vengeance, and she squeezes her legs together and tries to hold it in. Right. Full bladder. That's why she woke up, that's what's keeping her awake.

There's a soft rustle of fabric on fabric as Sakura gently tosses the sheet covering her aside, and then she's slowly making her way through the room and through the hallway and through the house, half-awake, until she reaches the bathroom. She flicks on the light and squints, feels confused for a moment because her bathroom is blue, and this one is all white, white, white gleaming tiles and porcelain fixtures- oh, right, she's at Ino's, her sleepy brain realises. She yawns again, a little annoyed by the brightness of the whole bathroom, and then mechanically empties her bladder and washes her hands, her eyes mostly closed and her mind mostly empty of everything except the need to sleep.

Sakura more or less sleep-stumbles her way back to Ino's room, where it's just as warm as it was when she left. She shuffles to the bed, only to realise that Ino is sleeping on her back in the middle of the bed, sprawled like a starfish and gently wheezing and not really seeming to care that she's taken Sakura's spot.

Sakura narrows her sleep-filled eyes at Ino and nudges the other's shoulder with her hand, whispering for her to "Move it," as she tugs a little on the sheets trapped under her weight. Ino grunts something under her breath, possibly an insult (although if so, it's too mangled for Sakura to make heads or tails of it). Eventually, Ino rolls back to her own side of the bed and Sakura can finally crawl in and lay down on the soft, soft, soft mattress. It feels a little like heaven, if she's to be honest.

Sakura's tired eyes fall shut and she falls asleep to the sound of Ino's wheezing breaths.


End file.
